The objective of traditional goal-oriented strategies is to construct an optimal mesh that minimizes the problem size needed to achieve a user prescribed tolerance error for a given quantity of interest (QoI). Typical geophysical resistivity measurement acquisition systems can easily record electromagnetic (EM) fields. However, depending upon the application, EM fields are sometimes loosely related to the quantity that is to be inverted (conductivity or resistivity), and therefore they become inadequate for inversion. In the present work, we study the impact of the selection of the QoI in our inverse problem. We focus on two different acquisition systems: marine controlled source electromagnetic (CSEM), and magnetotellurics (MT). For both applications, numerical results illustrate the benefits of employing adequate QoI. Specifically, the use as QoI of the impedance matrix on MT measurements provides significant computational savings, since one can replace the existing absorbing boundary conditions (BCs) by a homogeneous Dirichlet BC to truncate the computational domain, something that is not possible when considering EM fields as QoI.